Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark — director and famed producer of numerous classics, including but not limited to Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and Zu Warriors (2001), Peking Opera Blues, the Once Upon a Time in China and Swordsman series, Green Snake, The Blade and U.S. works such as Double Team and Knock Off — should need little introduction to readers. As an auteur, Tsui’s penchant for tonal discontinuity, perpetual motion mise en scène, machine-gun photography, and bravura editing set the template for a post-New Wave Hong Kong cinema that would ultimately crater in the aftermath of the 1997 handover.
By contrast, Louis Cha’s (aka Jin Yong’s) The Legend of the Condor Heroes (and its sequels The Return of the Condor Heroes and The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre) — from which Tsui’s latest takes its cues, specifically from chapters 34–40 — may require a broader primer, albeit familiarity with other works inspired by the series, including Wong Kar-Wai and Jeffrey Lau’s respective Ashes of Time and The Eagle Shooting Heroes, as well as Chang Cheh’s The Brave Archer series, will provide some orientation. In sum, The Legend of the Condor Heroes is a multi-generation spanning epic focused on the Song dynasty born and sworn siblings, Guo Jing and Yang Kang, who come to grow up at opposite political ends of the warring medieval China: Guo among the invading Mongols and Yang among the Northeastern Jin dynasty, whom the former seek to overthrow before progressing south to eliminate the Song and claim all of China in Genghis Khan’s good name. Further subtleties of the overall story include the “Five Greats” (for whom Ashes of Time serves as an unofficial prequel) and the role several play — introduced by way of love interest Huang Rong, daughter of Huang Yaoshi, the Eastern Heretic — in instructing the simple but fundamentally noble Guo Jing in a range of martial secrets vital to the wulin (‘martial forest’), such as the Eighteen Subduing Dragon Palms and the Nine Yin Manual (or Novem Scripture), that he may ultimately use to preserve the integrity of the nation amidst the tumult of rising and falling dynasties and free radical, unsavory villains, such as Ouyang Feng (or Venom West), who desire these secrets for themselves.
Keeping this all straight? Good, because for any viewer with a modicum of interest in giving their time to Tsui Hark’s latest, familiarity will be required. All the more so, because the decision to require viewers to enter this epic in media res and to liberally expand battle dramatics is one rife with all the issues one might imagine. Structurally, the film is lost at sea in terms of what needs sutured in by way of flashbacks given the volume of more interesting material left on the table, while remaining equally bogged down with distended, divergent, and ultimately inert nationalist posturing about which dynasty should be protected or invaded and when. In general terms, the film does manage to impress in a limited sense in terms of the action-oriented, spectacular CGI requirements of its status as a 2025 Chinese New Year’s Mainland production (although its competitor Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force is the clear victor in this regard), and the romantic and familial melodramatics may land for some viewers. But neither is adept enough to salvage a blockbuster that was destined from conception to disappoint the familiar and confound the uninitiated.
But beyond all the general disarray of this particular project, the question of Tsui himself looms large. Since 2010 and Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, the director has plied his trade within the Mainland market, smuggling in his own thematic and stylistic idiosyncrasies for the eagle-eyed auteurist, while also maintaining a clear, frequently indulgent interest in leveraging his greater financial backing to experiment with considerable abandon in the possibilities of CG VFX. This writer wouldn’t be brave enough to quite term Flying Swords of Dragon Gate or Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings masterpieces, but they do undeniably bear the distinctive features of a fully engaged and impassioned artist. Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants, sadly, does not, giving off more an air of the overly prescribed and dictated than penned and directed. One hopes, of course, that Tsui may indeed have at least one more project in him that can showcase that free-spirited filmmaking knight errant nature, which, on paper, made him a perfect fit for this material. If not, there is always the option to crack open a Blu-ray case of whichever Tsui classic you like and remember his highs. And for those who persist with an implacable urge to see Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants, a little advice: do yourself a favor and follow it up with Chang Cheh’s The Brave Archer series, so that you may witness a god-level hand escort you through one of literature’s great adventures.
DIRECTOR: Tsui Hark; CAST: Xiao Zhang, Sabrina Zhuang, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Bayaertu; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; IN THEATERS: February 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 26 min.
Comments are closed.